Video games gain revenue edge over movies

On Nov. 12, the results were in: The Latest James Bond movie, “Skyfall,” had taken in a stunning $87 million over the weekend, an all-time record — for movies.

That same day, the video game “Halo” took in $220 million — not over a weekend, but in one day. There was some press about that, but nothing compared to the stories about “Skyfall.” A few days later, the latest version of the game “Call of Duty” was released and had sales of $500 million. That was also in one day. It’s doubtful that lifetime sales of “Skyfall” will ever reach that total. We’re big James Bond fans, but there is another story here.

If you look at the numbers — and believe us, Hollywood always looks at the numbers — the story is who has the numbers. Along with the enormous sales of these top video game franchises versus a top movie franchise, one might look at the huge differences in the details of the story. A movie has big salary, production and distribution costs; a video game has nowhere near those kinds of upfront costs and almost no distribution cost — it can be downloaded to the customer.

And then there’s the question of value — entertainment value. A movie is enjoyed for a couple of hours. And yes, it was fun, but the video game will be played for hundreds of hours. So the point of all this seems pretty obvious: There’s been a change in the weather, as the song goes.

We’ve never been smartphone fans. When we leave our office, we leave the Internet behind. We are two of those now seldom-seen people whose noses aren’t glued to a tiny screen.

But prices are getting tempting. So we decided to check out the 45-day free trial of a smartphone offered to members of the American Association of Retired Persons at ConsumerCellular/AARP. For $17 a month and the cost of a phone, the deal allows you to surf the Web, send text messages, email or just talk. A refurbished iPhone on the site costs $200, but we went for an Android phone, the Huawei 8800, for $175.

The phone is fine; it’s the plan that stinks. Joy went on the Internet to check messages for about 10 minutes and the phone showed she had used half her allotted Web usage for the month. They have other plans, but the costs go up quickly. In short, beware of deals aimed at seniors. When we called to say we wanted to cancel the service, they just hung up.

So we decided to switch to T-Mobile. It offered unlimited use of the Web on a prepaid (no-contract) phone for $30 a month and 100 minutes of talk time. Or you can get unlimited use of the Web, with unlimited talk and texting, for $2 a day on the days you use it. For us, that might be only $4 a month. (We do our talking the old-fashioned way: face to face.)

None of those deals were immediately apparent by going to their Web site: T-Mobile.com. But when Joy hovered on a page with prepaid phones, a chat window popped up and she had a text conversation with a human. (We presume they were human.) Then the deals came thick and fast — and they were good ones.

We’re looking at T-Mobile’s offer of a Samsung Galaxy for $200. Hey, even if we rarely use it, we want the best. You never know when you might need to send an emergency email or get an answer to important questions, like “How old was Cary Grant when he starred in ‘Charade?’ ”

•Try PopSci.com for unusual gifts in the tools and gadgets categories, also information on how to make your own Twinkies. Real guys like tools, maybe Twinkies, too.

•Try entering a search term for anything that you think might appeal to the person in mind: toy trains, floats for walking on water, remote-controlled planes, bracelets that count your steps, etc. Bob is giving his 5-year-old grandson a digital microscope. What the microscope sees shows on the computer screen.

When Joy was 7, she thought asking for a giant stuffed donkey for Christmas was the height of extravagance. But today’s kids want gadgets. The iPad, iPod Touch, iPad Mini and iPhone took four of the five top slots on the Christmas wish-list for kids, according to a Nielsen survey. The iPad is in first place and the Nintendo Wii U is in second. Everything else in the top five is an Apple device.

Every day we hear of a new business or science project that’s been “crowd sourced.” That’s the phrase for a website that asks for donations or investments for projects instead of going to a bank or venture capital firm. So this just in: crowd-sourcing Christmas and holiday activities using CrowdTilt.com.

A group in Dallas is raising $400 for a Christmas party, while another is shooting for New Year’s. In Worcester, a group raised $1,690 to rent a ski lodge in Vermont.

CrowdTilt also lists charitable causes, and the site automatically sends receipts for tax deductions. Eighty-six percent of fundraising campaigns on the site are successful, and they usually raise about double their initial goal. The average request size is $870. A campaign that makes it a third of the way toward its goal pretty quickly usually ends up with all of it a few hours before deadline. Most fundraising campaigns last around 11 days. If a campaign “tilts” (is successful), the site collects a fee of 2.5 percent, though fees have been waived recently for any fundraising related to Hurricane Sandy.

AVG.com still has our favorite free anti-virus program, but we recently tested the freebie Kingsoft Antivirus 2012 from Download.com. It’s great for slow computers because it uses hardly any system resources.

After installing Kingsoft Antivirus, we tried downloading and installing a bridge game at funbridge.com. Before it installed, however, the Kingsoft program warned us the bridge game was about to change the computer’s registry, something that is often an indicator of malware. We took the recommendation to not install and dumped the bridge program.

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